Dick Armey has become a de facto leader of the Republican Right, through his corporate-funded FreedomWorks astroturf group which provided substantial support for the allegedly grass-roots tea parties.
Armey was a conservative Texas Congressman and Majority Leader from 1995 to 2003, before cashing in as a lobbyist and astroturf organizer against everything Obama.
So this "leading light of grass-roots conservatism" now chats with Newsmax about 2012 politics, and foresees civil unrest if Obama is re-elected:
Asked whether he is concerned the president’s stewardship over the nation could foment the sort of civil unrest seen elsewhere in the world, the former House majority leader replied: “I think it could. First of all, we have to accept President Obama is just a hopelessly lost, romantic egalitarian.
“If you read his own books . . . his whole accounting of how he went to Harvard and looked up all the Marxist professors. I guarantee you, if you got all your knowledge from Marxist professors, you got everything wrong.”
Since our "Marxist" President got everything wrong, Armey knowingly predicts that his dittohead army will hit the streets and stay there, like in Arab Spring countries, if the "Marxist" is re-elected.
More, below.
Aside from the absurd Marxist jibe, Armey's argument about civil unrest includes the basic tea party/far-right slur that Obama is the "Other" -- not one of us white Christian Confederate conservatives.
Armey said he has never seen a U.S. leader “so wholly misguided about the nature and character of the way the world works and the history of America in the history of the world, as this president: He just doesn’t know who we are.”
Obama "just doesn’t know who we are" -- Armey knows that this dog-whistle stuff about unAmerican/anti-American Obama appeals to the GOP/tea party base, since he's been doing it for two-plus years, with some success.
White, mostly old, conservative Republicans never liked Obama, and voted against him in 2008. But in 2009 they were energized by Fox "News", talk radio wingnuts, and opportunists like Armey to hate Obama and "take our country back," and that became the "tea party movement."
Unsurprisingly, Armey also promoted Rick Perry, a fellow right-wing Texan, for President:
We like him because he knows what he stands for and he’s willing to make a commitment to that. And we dare to believe that once he gets past the elections and sits in that office, that he’ll live by those commitments to constitutional limitations on big government.
The Great Recession may indeed provoke civil unrest on a larger scale than tea party rallies and Occupy Wall Street, in part because Republican austerity policies pushed by people like Armey are making the Great Recession worse.
Armey seems to relish the prospect.